How to Find the Best Hashtags on Twitter to Boost Engagement
October 25, 2018 | By Ilfusion Team
Hashtags are essential elements for the desired discoverability of digital content, and much more so for content posted on social media. Basically, hashtags are words or phrases that are preceded by the pound sign (#) with no punctuation or spaces—for example, #marketing and #digitalmarketing. On social media, people insert hashtags to their posts to make them more easily searchable when someone searches a particular tag or keyword.
Twitter was one of the first social media sites that incorporated hashtags into their platform. While other popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn also support the use of hashtags in their content, hashtags on Twitter are more relevant due to the succinct nature of Twitter content.
Why Hashtags Are Important for Twitter Marketing
Including trending and popular hashtags on Twitter is one of the most tried and tested techniques in boosting the reach of a brand’s message to their target audience, as well as reaching outside and beyond their own followers.
Hashtags provide the value of classifying tweets according to a certain theme, mood, event, topic, or more. It also provides more context to individual tweets, which is essential in encouraging engagement and conversations.
As such, hashtags are crucial tools for marketers, as they not only boost their reach but also aid in gathering ideas about what their audience feel and think, join in on relevant conversations, and promote their own branding. Hashtags are also valuable to marketers in:
- monitoring brand mentions on social media
- conducting market research
- curating targeted hashtags for certain audience personas
- monitoring brand events and campaigns
- tracking relevant influencers, and more
Top 3 Tools for Finding the Best Hashtags on Twitter
In order to have a successful and effective Twitter marketing strategy, it is essential to choose the right hashtags that work best with your marketing goals. While you can easily check out Twitter’s built-in “Trends for You” feature to find trending topics and hashtags, it can only provide very basic insight.
The good news is that there are many online tools available to help you find and choose the best hashtags for your brand. These tools can also provide advanced and granular data about hashtag performance and popularity:
1. Hashtags.org
Hashtags.org is one of the top Twitter hashtag tools that come into mind. Its interface, while not exactly at par with modern web design standards, is simple and straightforward. Just enter a keyword or keyword phrase (without spaces) on the search bar found on the homepage, and you will be shown a wealth of information, such as the popularity of the hashtag for a certain time period, list of most recent tweets using the hashtag, a list of related hashtags, and more.
Pricing: The platform can be used for free. However, if you need to track analytic data and more advanced tools such as hashtag comparison and data storage, plans start at $49/month. Hashtags.org come in a variety of pricing packages for individual, business, enterprise, and agency accounts. Check out their pricing here.
2. RiteTag
RiteTag is part of RiteKit’s suite of tools for social media publishing and digital marketing. RiteTag provides real-time hashtag suggestions for both text-based posts and images. It also provides data on which hashtags are best for Instagram and for Twitter, as well as granular data on a hashtag’s popularity based on the number of tweets, retweets, and impressions. The platform also has a Chrome extension and Android app available for download, which allows you to highlight a certain text or right-click an image and instantly get hashtag suggestions for it.
Pricing: RiteTag is available to use for free. You can upgrade to their paid plan ($49/year), which offers hashtag suggestions for 1,000 queries/month and a 30-day analytic report.
3. Trendsmap
For international brands who are looking into geo-targeting their tweets, Trendsmap is the best tool for you. Trendsmap allows you to search trending hashtags, words, and users by location, and the search results are presented in a visual map.
Pricing: The free version is very simple and provides only the most basic features; that is, show trending hashtags by location only. Advanced analytics and visualization tools are available through their paid packages, starting at $250/user/month. They also cater customized annual pricing packages. For more information, check their pricing information here.
In Conclusion
With the saturation of content available on the Internet today, hashtags are crucial elements to a business’s content marketing strategy now more than ever. While there are no hard-and-fast rules to follow when creating hashtags on Twitter, and while the tools stated above are only there to guide you, the most important thing to remember is that brands should not necessarily jump into the bandwagon of popular hashtags all the time. It is a good idea for businesses to occasionally create their own branded hashtags to help differentiate you from the competition.
If you want to know more, or if you’re interested in having Ilfusion help you with your social media and content marketing efforts, give us a call at 888-420-5115, or send us an email to [email protected].
